Tag: First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange following his expulsion from Ecuador’s embassy in London on April 11 sparked debate among journalists about the dangerous precedents his case could set. Are the journalists who won awards reporting leaks Assange published hypocritical if they now support his arrest? Would successfully prosecuting Assange on accusations of a hacking conspiracy that involved helping Chelsea Manning crack passwords to disclose classified material allow the prosecution of journalists for reporting other classified materials leaked to them in the future? The Justice Department’s year-old indictment against Assange, which you can read here, includes an accusation of conduct that could arguably be considered a breach of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics: Assange agreed to help Chelsea Manning “crack” a password to a Defense Department computer. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an advocacy group that provides pro bono legal representation to journalists, weighed in on Assange’s arrest with prescient discernment. “It bears repeating that no one is outside the protection of the First Amendment. The singular allegation that Assange may have attempted to crack a password takes this case out of the ‘easy’ category for press freedom advocates. The government would be mad, reckless — or, worse, actively anti-democratic — to bring a similar case without the password-cracking angle.” Assange’s case raises compelling questions about what the First Amendment protects and what it does not. Cultivating a source, protecting a source’s identity, communicating with a source securely—the indictment describes all of these activities as the ‘manners and means’ of the conspiracy.” Would the Justice Department necessarily prosecute other journalists for these daily news gathering practices if it wins its case against Assange? As the Committee writes, “time will tell how this plays out.”

Like those defenses, Stone’s claims will be evaluated in the light of the still emerging but increasingly troubling facts of the campaign and its associates’ active connivance with the Russian cyber attack on the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Most famously, Stone predicted in August of 2016 that something momentous involving Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—his “time in the barrel”—was about to break, two months before Wikileaks distributed hacked emails of Podesta’s. The statement of offense reveals an email Stone sent to Corsi in July 2016 with the request or instruction that Corsi, “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails.”. On Stone’s account, whatever he did to find about this material, such as having Corsi “get the pending emails,” is just what a dirty trickster and master of hardball politics would do if properly schooled in the rule that “to win you must do everything.” Stone’s legal defense fund is currently appealing for donations to protect Stone from Mueller’s supposed attempts to “criminalize normal political activities.” The investigation of Stone’s activities will not, of course, be the first time that practitioners of dirty tricks encounter the legal limits of their“normal” activities. He was indicted for violating a provision of the 1971 federal campaign finance law that required that campaign literature distributed “in connection with a candidate’s campaign” but without the candidate’s authorization carry a notice to that effect, making clear that the named candidate was “not responsible” for its content. The violation of this transparency requirement was enough to support a prosecution, but Congress later concluded that it needed to enact a more detailed prohibition of acts of political “sabotage.” The counterfeiting of campaign literature for which Segretti went to jail was just a means to the larger end of disrupting an opposing campaign. The Russian government’s theft of emails belonging to the Democratic Party and senior Clinton associates, and the distribution of these materials via WikiLeaks, were intended to wreak havoc on the Democratic presidential campaign. He remained in contact with the candidate and active in support of the Trump campaign. Should it turn out that they were encouraging and supporting a foreign government and its agents in any phase of the plan to acquire and disseminate stolen emails, they run headlong into the law barring foreign nationals from providing “anything of value” to an American political candidate. Stone, an admirer of Richard Nixon who has the former president’s image tattooed on his back, would like to have Nixonian “dirty tricks” accepted as good, old-fashioned political "hardball."

In a closed-door meeting with evangelical leaders Monday night, President Donald Trump repeated his debunked claim that he had gotten "rid of" a law forbidding churches and charitable organizations from endorsing political candidates, according to recorded excerpts reviewed by NBC News. But Trump cited this alleged accomplishment as one in a series of gains he has made for his conservative Christian supporters, as he warned, "You're one election away from losing everything that you've got," and said their opponents were "violent people" who would overturn these gains "violently." "Now one of the things I'm most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment," the president said. The president doesn't have the power to repeal a law — only Congress can do that. Trump said to the religious leaders at the White House: "Now you're not silenced anymore. The Johnson Amendment doesn't prohibit individual speech, and it has rarely been enforced. Trump "doesn't have the legal authority to overturn the Johnson Amendment," Magarian said. In the beginning of his private remarks to the evangelical leaders, Trump cited a comment he said was made by Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist leader who is one of his religious allies "I had the great Robert Jeffress back there. He added: "Hopefully I've proven that to be a fact in terms of the second part. Trump added, to applause: "They say Merry Christmas a lot right now.

As the world gears up for a new round of elections (from the U.S. midterms to the Swedish and European Parliament votes), lawmakers want the likes of Facebook and Google to take greater ownership of policing what’s posted on their social networks, while also warning that these tech giants are gaining too much sway over every aspect of people’s online lives. But such efforts (and we’re already seeing them take hold with a spate of tech firms banning Alex Jones, the far-right U.S. media personality, and the upcoming anniversary of Germany’s hate speech rules) will likely cement these firms as digital gatekeepers at a time when even the most pro-tech of politicians now openly questions if Silicon Valley has too much power. Big Tech must be held more accountable for the reams of photos, posts and — increasingly — misinformation and extremist speech that have come to define social media. It comes down to an uncomfortable choice over whom we want making the tough calls between online freedom of speech, misinformation and hate speech: democratically elected officials, many of whom don’t know their way around the technical complexities of these issues, or private companies whose responsibility lies with their shareholders, not voters. So far, though, officials have been more than willing to let companies take the lead in how to respond to online misinformation and extremist posts. Even as Facebook suspends a raft of “inauthentic accounts” that have been trying to fan existing social and cultural divisions, politicians can’t get new rules over the line to increase transparency over online political advertising, let alone decide how to clamp down on hate speech in ways that would comply with the First Amendment. * * * By making tech companies the first port of call in tackling misinformation and extremist speech, politicians are setting themselves up for a nasty fall. And in a world where many now question the dominance of a small number of the West Coast’s biggest names, officials are also doubling down on that supremacy by giving these firms central roles in how governments respond to digital misinformation and hate speech. Sure, it would be unreasonable to expect policymakers to tackle disinformation and hate speech on their own. And the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter have (reluctantly) made changes to weed out the worst forms of online content, particularly when it comes to alleged election meddling and online trolling.